FLOOD (New Zealand Prague Quadrenniale 2015)

Abstract

FLOOD weaves stories of Aotearoa into a journey between the city and the river in Prague. As the latest iteration within the performance cycle Tongues of Stone. FLOOD is a site-responsive performance from New Zealand that moves from Old Town Prague to the banks of the Vlatva River. As ecolocial and mythical cleansing catastrophes FLOODS involve inundations, deluges and overflows. Excessive and abundant, they overwhelm, wash away and dissolve terra firma introducing us to drowned realms as well as the flotsam and jetsam carried inland from the sea and gathered in their path. Briefly creating oceanic worlds, these sudden and intense events sweep objects and bodies into a saturated maelstrom, followed by a state of waterlogged exhaustion. Taking place as part of the New Zealand Exhibition, Ahua O Te Rangi, FLOOD retells the turbulent and consistent flooding of the Vlatva River, drawing on the poem of the same name written in 1602 by English-Czech poet Elizabeth Jane Weston. A soundscape, listened to on headphones provides the undertow for a gathering momentum as the audience is swept along through actions that rouse a sense of crisis as they lead to the riverbank and an act of recovery. Crossing times, places and cultures, the work makes connections through water, that most mutable of substances, between distant places, proposing that it is a carrier of memories.